Madison, Wis. — A team of environmental health specialists deployed by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) is now assisting the state of Wisconsin with flood-related public-health issues, disaster recovery officials announced today.

Madison, Wis. — The Village of Rock Springs will hold a public meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 23, from 7 to 9 p.m., to begin development of a plan to address long-term solutions to community issues brought about by the flooding caused by the June and July storms. The meeting will be held at Rock Springs Elementary School, 306 Elm Street, in Rock Springs.

Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED)

Puerto Rico Heavy Rainfall

The Puerto Rico Emergency Operations Center (PR EOC) remains partially activated 24/7, along with the Puerto Rico Emergency Management Agency (PREMA) Joint Information Center (partially activated), select ESF’s and US Coast Guard Liaison.

The Governor requested a Major Disaster Declaration and the Puerto Rican government has reported five (5) confirmed fatalities due to heavy rainfall and flooding.

Sixteen (16) shelters, with a population of 487 (in 16 municipalities) are open, while 14 preventative shelters remain open in twelve (12) municipalities.

Thirteen (13) rivers are flooded and a total of 43 major roads are closed due to flooding or mudslides.

The Puerto Rico Electric and Power Authority (PREPA) reports approximately 4,000 customers are without service and the Puerto Rico Aqueduct Sewer Authority (PRASA) reports about 18,644 customers are without service.  Restoration of utilities is unknown at this time.

Public Assistance (PA) Preliminary Damage Assessments (PDAs) were completed in 18 municipalities, Individual Assistance (IA) PDAs were completed in 22 municipalities and PDAs are scheduled for 9 more municipalities, continuing through the weekend.

The Puerto Rican Army National Guard (PR ArNG) has 54 soldiers on State Active Duty (SAD) for water distribution, debris clearance, equipment transportation and civilian relocation. (FEMA Region II & CAD, PREMA, VITEMA, NWS, NGB SitRep #3)

Federal / State Response for Hurricane Ike and Midwest Storms

Region V
Ohio
The State EOC is activated at Level II (Partial Operations) and Joint PDAs are scheduled to begin on October 26.
There are eight (8) fatalities and ten (10) injuries reported by the state.
There are no shelters reported open, while the US Department of Energy (DOE) reports there are 9,595 customers without power.  Power restoration is expected to be completed by midnight, September 26.

Illinois
One (1) fatality is reported by the state.
IA PDAs were completed and PA PDAs are scheduled to begin on September 29.

Indiana
The State EOC is activated at Level IV (Normal Operations) and Joint PDAs were completed in five (5) counties and are ongoing in two (2) counties.
There are eight (8) fatalities and 19 injuries reported by the state.
There is one (1) shelter open with a population of 95, and the US DOE reports there are 6,186 customers remaining without power.  (Region V Operations Report, Sep 25; DOE, Sep 25; NSS Shelter Report, Sep 25)

FEMA Region VI
Louisiana
The Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) is activated at Level III (Emergency Operations).
There are five (5) fatalities reported by the state.
There are seven (7) shelters open with a population of 430, and the US DOE reports 12,287 customers are still without power.
Nineteen (19) of 21 PDAs are completed and there are no reported shortfalls or critical issues at this time.
There are 14 Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs) and two (2) Mobile Disaster Recovery Centers (MDRCs) in support of Hurricane Gustav/Ike recovery efforts.  (SLB, Sep 25; NSS Shelter Report, Sep 25; DOE, Sep 25)

Texas
The State Operations Center (SOC) is activated at Level I, 24/7 Operations.
There are 19 fatalities reported by the state.
There are 66 shelters open with a population of 4,653 and US DOE reports that 482,840 customers remain without power, with the highest percentages in Harris (393,251), Galveston  (28,098), Brazoria (23,013) and Jefferson (less than 888) Counties.

FEMA continues to supply commodities to the Texas State-managed Resource Staging Area.
There are seven (7) Disaster Recovery Center (DRCs) and 13 Mobile Disaster Recovery Center (MDRCs) operational in the affected areas.  (NSS Shelter Report, Sep 25; DOE, Sep 25; SLB, Sep 25)

Presidio, TX Levee Issue Update:
The release of water from the Luis Leon Reservoir in Chihuahua, Mexico is reduced and hardening of the levees on the U.S. side of the border is complete. (NOC Awareness Report, Sep 25; FEMA HQ)

Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG)

Nothing significant to report. (FEMA HQ)

Tropical Weather Outlook

Atlantic/Caribbean:
Tropical Storm Kyle
At 5:00 a.m. EDT, the center of Tropical Storm (TS) Kyle was located about 510 miles south-southwest of Bermuda.

TS Kyle is moving toward the north near 12 mph and a turn toward the north-northwest, accompanied by a gradual increase in forward speed, is expected later today and on Saturday, September 27.  On this track, the center of TS Kyle and the strongest winds are forecast to remain west of Bermuda.

Reports from a US Air Force Reserve unit reconnaissance aircraft indicate that maximum sustained winds have increased to near 60 mph, with higher gusts.  Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours and TS Kyle could become a hurricane by Saturday, September 27.

Tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 160 miles, mainly east of the center, and the minimum central pressure recently measured by reconnaissance aircraft was 997 mb (29.44 inches).

Extratropical Low #1 - Low Potential for Tropical Cyclone Formation
As of 2:00 a.m. EDT, September 26, a well-defined, non-tropical low pressure system has moved inland over northeastern South Carolina and is located about midway between Myrtle Beach and Florence.

Strong winds, coastal flooding, high surf and dangerous rip currents will gradually subside along the coasts of North and South Carolina today, but will continue along portions of the US mid-Atlantic coast during the next day or two.

Extratropical Low #2 - Low Potential for Tropical Cyclone Formation
As of 2:00 a.m. EDT, September 26, an area of disturbed weather, located in the Bay of Campeche, is moving slowly eastward toward the Yucatan Peninsula.  There are some signs of organization, but this system is expected to move inland over the Western Yucatan before any significant development can occur.

The system could still bring heavy rains to portions of southern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula during the next couple of days.
 
Eastern Pacific:
There is no tropical cyclone activity expected in the next 24-48 hours.

Western Pacific:
There is no tropical cyclone activity affecting United States Territories.  (NOAA, HPC, National Hurricane Center, Central Pacific Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center)

Earthquake Activity

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Preliminary Damage Assessments

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Wildfire Update

National Fire Activity as of Thursday, September 25, 2008:
National Wildfire Preparedness Level: 2
Initial attack activity: Light (67)
New large fires: 3
Uncontained large fires: 6
Large fires contained: 0
States with large fires: CA, OR  (NIFC)

Predictive Weather:  Warm and dry across the southwest and central Rockies as high pressure continues to dominate across the Four Corners region.  Southwest winds of 20-30 mph across much of the Great Basin westward to the Sierra Range in eastern California are forecast.  Dry and warm across parts of the Ohio Valley across the northern Florida Panhandle.  Heavy rains and strong winds are expected as a coastal storm moves onshore across the Carolinas up through the mid-Atlantic Seaboard.  Cool, onshore flow across the Pacific Northwest with widespread showers.  (NIFC)

Disaster Declaration Activity

Puerto Rico:  The Governor of Puerto Rico requested a Major Disaster Declaration as a result of Severe Flooding beginning September 21, 2008 and continuing.  The Governor is requesting Individual Assistance for eight municipalities and Hazard Mitigation for the entire Commonwealth. (FEMA HQ)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern spoke to members of the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America at the Westin Hotel in Washington, D.C., yesterday, highlighting CBP’s collaborative work with the NCBFAA to address trade security and facilitation issues. (more)

“Every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tried to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it was for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.” Petronius (AD 166)

This week the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cyber Security and Science and Technology and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held hearings on cyber security recommendations for the next Administration. In that hearing and in the follow-on press DHS came under criticism for not doing enough to protect our nation’s cyber networks. There were even calls for DHS’s role in cyber security to be pulled away.

A reorganization of roles and responsibilities is the worst thing that could be done to improve our nation’s security posture against very real and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. In January 2008, the current Administration developed Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23, which established the Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI). Since then and for the first time in the Nation’s history, DHS along with its partners at the Department of Defense (DoD), FBI, and Intelligence Community have an integrated strategy and action plan to improve cyber security across federal, military and civilian networks. We have moved beyond words on paper and debate, and are now driving real improvements to our security. We cannot afford to lose that momentum and interagency unity of effort.

Within DHS, I manage the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), which has the mission to reduce security risks across both physical and cyber infrastructure as well as telecommunications and lead the Department’s efforts for the CNCI. Specifically, we lead federal civilian (i.e., “.gov”) and private sector network defense. Without question, it is a monumental task - one that requires interagency coordination and focus. As a nation, we cannot afford to be distracted from this mission.

In the past six months we have made great progress in this role. We have begun deployment of EINSTEIN 2 ( pdf), which will give us comprehensive, real-time intrusion detection capabilities and one point of situational awareness across all executive branch agencies. We have engaged the private sector to develop partnerships and to improve information sharing. And we have built the core of a management team with the experience and expertise to continue to lead this effort into the future. We have accomplished much in a relatively short amount of time. Securing our nation’s cyber networks is a complex and expansive problem, and it took years of growing cyberspace dependence to put us in this position - it will take a solid plan and resolve to accomplish results.

I respect the strong resumes and experience of many of the people that are publicly weighing in on these issues, and, in fact, many of them were previously in key posts that had an opportunity to impact our nation’s cyber security. I encourage them to actually spend some time with DHS discussing our plan before they finalize their conclusions and go public with their recommendations.

I certainly agree that we can still do much to continue to improve cyber security in our nation, but calls for reorganization at this point simply makes no sense. We have a plan and are on a path that will address these serious national cyber vulnerabilities. We must stay the course.

Robert D. Jamison
Under Secretary National Protection & Programs

Thanks for all your comments to date - I do read them and mentally log them even where I don’t respond directly to them in my posts.

I want to deal, though, with some of the comments about the channel content, and also to share with you some of the issues we face in making decisions for the channel.

BBC HD aims to broadcast in HD the best of programming available from the BBC.

Clearly, “best” is quite a subjective term. It could mean the content which works “best” in HD. When we make decisions about where to make HD investments, that is one of our considerations, and part of the reason why the first programming to deliver in HD has been our sport, costume dramas and natural history.

But it’s not always possible to predict whether a programme or series will work well in this way - sometimes we can find a strong visual awareness in unexpected places, and sometimes programmes which we expect to look good in HD don’t.

But our promise to look to the “best of the BBC” needs also to reflect the programmes that you (and others) in our audience tell us you really like - either because you watch them in large numbers, or because you tell us in other ways that you think they represent really valuable programming.

And the range of programmes there is much broader - we know that it extends to entertainment shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Jonathan Ross, sport, comedy, documentaries, music and also some daytime programmes.

I believe firmly that the BBC has a responsibility to consider programmes from across the full range of content and channels which we broadcast, and that we should continually experiment with forms of programming which are not available elsewhere in HD.

They may not look as pristine as those programmes for which HD is a more instinctive format, but they add to the range of HD content available to viewers who have invested in HD connections, and they help to ensure that on BBC HD, as on all other BBC channels, we are able to offer programmes which suit as wide a range of tastes as possible.

Even though we’ve been making programmes in HD for some time now, we still have a great deal to learn about the best ways to work with what remains an emerging technology.

A number of you have commented on the picture quality on Jonathan Ross. You’re right - the show doesn’t look as good at the moment in HD as we would like it to. That’s not because - as mwbennett suggests, we’re doing it on the cheap, or because light entertainment or studio shows as a whole have a lower quality threshold.

But the conversion of studio TC4 to HD is very recent, and we took a decision that we wanted to bring you the whole series of Jonathan Ross, rather than sorting all technical issues in advance of starting broadcast.

There are still elements affecting picture quality along the broadcast chain that we are working on (and some of these don’t just relate to Jonathan Ross). I hope that, as we address them, the picture quality will improve across the channel.

Having said that we want to make sure that the best of the BBC’s content is available to you in HD, however that’s defined, I have to tell Dazza124 that, unfortunately, Merlin will not be on BBC HD.

Sometimes, for a whole variety of reasons, the production team decides that it doesn’t want to use the format. Those of us on BBC HD felt that Merlin was a show that we should aim to deliver in high definition, but in the end it was shot in Super 16.

Derek500 asks for the “official” reason for not showing the Strictly Come Dancing results show in HD. I wasn’t aware of an “unofficial” reason, but there is no particular issue in discussing why it won’t be available on the channel this year.

A lot of work was done to try to ensure that the results show as well as the main show could be made in HD. But the nature of the results show, with lots of small camera filming and a fast turnaround, meant that we were unable to guarantee that the show could be delivered with the requisite proportions of HD content.

I had to take a decision about whether to pursue discussions and invest money which then couldn’t be used for other programmes in a show which had a high chance of not actually delivering in HD. Reluctantly, I took the view that we should lose the programme from the HD schedule. It’s not a decision I’m particularly pleased about, but in the circumstances it seemed to be the best one to make.

I am discovering that life at BBC HD is full of this kind of tricky dilemma - to a large extent, it is because the channel and technology are so interwoven into the other things that the BBC does, and the life of the rest of the channel portfolio.

This is particularly true when it comes to scheduling the channel. We want to bring you the best content available, and we recognise that most of the time you would like to see it in HD at the same time that it is being broadcast in SD.

But sometimes BBC One and BBC Two both have something made in HD on at the same time, and sometimes the rights we have to broadcast the content mean that our flexibilty is very restricted.

We have at least two instances coming up. Silent Witness is on at the same time as the first episode of Heroes, which we can only play at the same time as one of the other channels broadcasting it because of the rights we can afford to buy on it.

And we also have a clash between the last episode of the BBC Two series The Tudors (which I hope you have been enjoying) and the first episode of BBC One’s Little Britain USA - both also acquisitions.

In both cases, we’ll aim to broadcast both programmes on the channel - but obviously, only one can go out at the time that it is being shown in SD, and the other slots we have available may be less suited to the content and your lives.

We have heated debates within the team about what the best option is, and I suspect that, whichever programme we choose to prioritise, some of you will feel we’ve made the right decision and others the wrong one.

I’m interested as ever to know what you think - but also want you to know that even if you don’t like the outcomes we get to, the decisions don’t get taken lightly.

Danielle Nagler is Head of HDTV, BBC Vision.

BBC Radio Labs has been having fun this week Building Things For The Office. The result: “Dog Vader”!

BBC Backstage has been featured in Linux Magazine this month and also has news of a new project called CALLAS or…

“Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems”

And Backstage’s Rain Ashford has, by her own admission, a massively detailed report (and Flickr pics) from Serious Virtual Words in Coventry:

time and again speakers mentioned how virtual worlds are on the cusp of major development and in a similar emerging state as the web was in the early 90s

Tech Radar reports on Super Hi Vision, Ultra HD TV at the IBC conference.

Finally, Dan Taylor asks an intriguing question: “Is BBC Weather really more popular than porn?”

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog.

In light of the recent hurricanes of 2008, we have elected to run this 2004 article again for LawyersDotCom and LawyersBulletin readers, in order to revisit some of the issues that impact foreign nationals and the immigration process when there is a natural disaster. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued policies to help immigrants with difficulties related to status, documentation, and inability to meet deadlines due to the widespread devastation. The impact of Hurricane Ike (PDF 35.2KB) is not as far reaching, but has resulted in the temporary closure of the Houston USCIS office, as well the Houston asylum office and three application support centers. Information on USCIS office closings, interview rescheduling, and other disaster-related matters is available on the USCIS WebSite. (Sep 19, 2008)

Extract not available.

Sony says the PSP 3000’s battery life is better than previously stated.

(Credit: Sony via Joystiq)

Last week, GameSpot posted an interview with Sony PlayStation’s Director of Hardware Marketing, John Koller, in which he gave us a video tour of the upcoming PSP 3000.

In case you missed …